Internet based communication is becoming more prevalent. It provides numerous advantages over conventional methods of communication. For instance, Internet based communication is real-time, incurs lower costs, is more convenient, has a wide reach, is scalable and provides many other benefits for group communication. Internet based communication can include audio, video, or both.
However, real-time communication over the Internet also presents various issues, such as interruption in audio and/or video transmission, loss of transmission packets containing audio and/or video data, latency in audio/video transmission, jitter, and other issues. These issues result in loss of voice segments, loss of video frames, decreased audio quality, decreased video quality, and other types of poor user experience. These issues can be caused by the network connection between multiple parties of a real-time communication session. The network connection may be of low bandwidth or reliability.
Users' experience in real-time communication over the Internet is oftentimes evaluated by Quality of Experience (QoE). QoE can be described and measured by a number of parameters, such as video resolution, choppy video time, video sharpness (also known as video clarity) and choppy audio time. Accordingly, QoE can be affected by the quality of network connection between the participants of a particular real-time communication session. Poor network connection quality causes data packet loss or late arrival of data packets that result into choppy video and/or choppy audio (collectively referred to herein as choppy multimedia). Such late data packets are usually discarded in real-time communication, such as a conference meeting between a group of users. Data packets are blocks of data transmitted over the Internet. For instance, the data packets can be User Datagram Protocol (UDP) data packets. UDP is also a transport-layer networking protocol.
The capabilities of a user's terminal device (such as a desktop computer, a laptop computer, a tablet computer, or a smartphone) can also affect the user's experience. For example, choppy video and/or choppy audio may occur if the processing unit (such as CPUs) of the terminal device is not capable of quickly decoding received video and/or audio data. Monitoring and quickly identifying the QoE issues are thus vital in correcting and improving QoE in any real-time communication.
Traditionally, a monitoring system displays each monitored QoE parameter of each participant's terminal. These parameters are displayed one by one. A prior art partial QoE monitoring user interface is shown in FIG. 1 and generally indicated at 100. The QoE data shown at 100 indicates a first user's experience of listening to the audio and viewing the video of a second user. As user herein, it is said to be the first user's experience of the second user.
The plain sequential listing style of FIG. 1 presents numerous undesirable effects. It tries to list a big number of QoE parameters and is thus not intuitive. It also occupies excessive amount of display space. Accordingly, it is difficult to clearly and quickly identify each user's experience. For instance, user A's experience of listening to and/or viewing user B may be good while user A's experience of listening to and/or viewing user C involves choppy audio and/or video. Such a situation is hard to be identified in the sequential listing all users' QoE data. As used herein, a first user's (such as user A) experience of listening to and/or viewing a second user (such as user B) is termed as the first user's experience of the second user.
Accordingly, there is a need for a new QoE monitoring system for effectively identifying various QoE issues within a small display space. The new QoE monitoring system presents information of numerous QoE parameters of each user's experience of every other user in a single diagram. The new QoE monitoring system further allows a professional to quickly identify any user' QoE issues of the user's experience of any other user within a multi-user real-time communication session.